Mount-Royal: One Consistent Beautiful Mountain
Dominique Boulet
06.2023
The image of the mountain in the city centre with its towering cross has become synonymous with Montreal. Throughout its evolution, Mount-Royal has played an important role in Montreal’s history and development. Its impressive natural environment has always been valuable, but throughout its transformation, Mount-Royal’s story points to larger societal changes that were influential in Montreal becoming the city it is today. Mount-Royal is not only a physically important feature of Montreal, but it is socially emblematic in many ways. Its development into a park in the 19th century was part of a larger movement of the creation of large urban parks across North America (Bérubé, 2022). At the same time as Mount-Royal was transforming into a park, Montreal was becoming the country’s metropolis. Industrialization and urbanization equally had its impacts on the development of the city and the park. Since it’s inauguration in 1876, Mount-Royal Park has experienced many changes and accompanying societal shifts. This story explores the history of Mount-Royal throughout its different phases: its role in Montreal’s settlement, the period and process of design and landscaping, and the challenges and changes it has experienced as a large beloved park. The evolution of the mountain has been parallel to the development of the city and showcases the tensions between the growth of a metropolis and its inhabitants need for access to green space.
Mount-Royal’s Role in Montreal’s Settlement and Development
Today, in many parts of Montreal, the mountain acts as a guiding landmark. The view of Mount-Royal in the distance can give a sense of direction, it separates downtown from the neighbourhood of Outremont to the North, the Plateau-Mont-Royal to the East, and Westmount and NDG to the West. At 759 feet above sea level, Mount-Royal has a diverse natural topography with sections of grass, forest, and crags (Bellman, 1977). It is one of eight hills that collectively make the Monteregian Hills across the St. Lawrence lowland (Bellman, 1977). The hill’s presence has played an important role in the settlement of people in Montreal as far back as 3000 B.C. (Les amis de la montagne, n.d.). Its location at the centre of the island with forests and a river nearby made it an appealing area for indigenous people who eventually formed the village of Hochelaga (Les amis de la montagne, n.d.). In 1535, the hill was named when Jacques Cartier visited the new world for a second time and when sailing up the St. Lawrence River met the indigenous villagers of Hochelaga who brought him up the mountain which he deemed royal: the “Mont-Royal”. Before Mount-Royal became a large park it served as a central site from which important parts of the city of Montreal were developed.
The mountain’s surrounding areas served as places for education, as burial and memorial sites and later for rest and healing. Mount-Royal’s unique and rich environment attracted the wealthy like James McGill who established McGill University, one of Canada’s first academic institutions, on the foot of the mountain in 1821. Before colonialization, indigenous people were burying their dead on the mountain and in the 1850s the French, English and Jewish populations built several large cemeteries in the area. Because large sections of Mount-Royal were memorial sites the area avoided the rapid urbanization that the rest of the city experienced. In 1861, the industrial revolution brought concerns of health and the mountain was seen as a therapeutic natural space. It was around this time that the Mount-Royal was considered an excellent site for a large urban park as well as the preferred area to build health services. Three hospitals were built close to Mount-Royal to take advantage of its natural space: Hôtel-Dieu (1861), Royal Victoria Hospital (1893) and Shriners Hospital for Children (1925) (Les amis de la montagne, n.d.).
The natural topography of the mountain drew people to settle nearby and to build some of society’s important institutions in the surrounding areas. As the city continued to grow, Mount-Royal’s diverse environment would be seen as an opportunity to grant the population a large accessible natural space. The story of Mount-Royal becoming an identity-defining park, began in the 19th century as part of a larger movement of the creation of large urban parks across North America.
Image 1. View from the Kondiaronk lookout.
Mount-Royal’s Transformation into a Large Urban Park
In the first half of the 19th century in North America, cities were dense with many green spaces where official urban parks were often separate private spaces reserved for the elite (Bérubé, 2022). However, this changed in North America with the combination of urbanization and industrialization. Industrial neighbourhoods were developed in the centre of cities, which took away accessible green spaces while increasing pollution (Bérubé, 2022). This emphasized a growing socioeconomic gap; the working class was living near the city centre, closer to the pollution with less access to green spaces while the elites began to move outwards (Bérubé, 2022) Bringing nature back into city centres was one effort to ease socioeconomic problems and improve wellbeing. The increasing influence of the reformist movement contributed to building large urban parks in cities across North America, as they were preoccupied by the effects of the urban environment on health and moral (Bérubé, 2022). This coalesced with the City Beautiful movement and Boosterism, both generally influencing big cities to revitalize. Frederick Law Olmsted, an activist and journalist turned landscape architect, was extremely influential in the creation of large urban parks in cities across North America. This movement signalled the change towards parks as public spaces. Olmsted’s philosophy was to create open public spaces that would foster community, he thought parks should provide common ground, be commonly owned and be accessible to everyone (Beveridge, 2009).
In his design of many large urban parks in North America, Olmsted in part defined the park system for large cities. For Olmsted, and many others in the mid-19th century, large parks were ultimately seen as an antidote to the urban environment and lifestyle. These spaces were about the experience of the landscape with the goal of providing immersive and varying scenes that would counteract the stress of living in a big city (Beveridge, 2009). Olmsted was equally concerned with the types of activities that would take place within these landscape scenes. Parks were to have multiple spaces to serve different purposes, for example they should have places for people to socialize and more formal areas for civic events. The first park that Olmsted designed, and through which his philosophy can be clearly seen, is Central Park in 1858. Following his work in New York City, he was seen as the leading landscape architect of his time. His influence can be seen in several places across Canada: Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg, the plains of Abraham in Quebec, and most notably Mount-Royal Park in Montreal (Bérubé, 2022). As his career advanced, Olmsted became increasingly preoccupied with the preservation of natural scenic areas which is reflected in his design of Mount-Royal Park (Beveridge, 2009).
As Montreal was becoming larger and more industrial, residents wanted Mount-Royal to become an official park and in 1872, the city purchased the land necessary to transform the mountain. Mount-Royal Park was to be designed from 522 acres of wilderness and in 1874 Olmsted was hired by the Montreal Park Commissioners to lead the project (Les amis de la montagne, n.d.; Bellman, 1977). His vision for the site was to build an organic network of roads, paths, and lookouts accessible to diverse visitors that would leisurely discover the park (Bellman, 1977). The natural topography of the mountain was very important to Olmsted, and he wanted to enhance it and create “one consistent beautiful mountain” (Bellman, 1977). Olmsted describes how he designed the footpaths as “successive incidents in a landscape poem, to each of which the mind is gradually led away, so that they become part of a consistent experience” (Bellman, 1977). For Olmsted, visitors of Mount-Royal Park were to leisurely experience and discover its landscape, almost forgetting they were in the city centre.
